


Intoxicating in Bad Taste

by rednihilist



Series: The Claws of Clause [1]
Category: Hannibal (TV), John Wick (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Assassins & Hitmen, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Dark Will Graham, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-17
Updated: 2017-08-05
Packaged: 2018-11-15 09:22:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 7,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11228031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rednihilist/pseuds/rednihilist
Summary: inward or outward, the Laws and Cause:mask under mask, face behind face,name within name, place beneath place.~Conrad AikenTwo assassins.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: _Hannibal_ and certain characters belong to Thomas Harris, as well as Sony Pictures Television, Bryan Fuller and NBC, as well as Dino De Laurentiis Company, Living Dead Guy Productions, et al. 
> 
> _John Wick_ and certain characters belong to Summit Entertainment, as well as Thunder Road Pictures, 87Eleven Productions, et al. 
> 
> In short, no profit is gained from this writing—only, hopefully, enjoyment.
> 
> Title from Baudelaire: Ce qu’il y a d’enivrant dans le mauvais gout, c’est le plaisir aristocratique de déplaire.  
> Roughly: What is intoxicating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.

Will is 13 the first time he actively kills someone. In the process of being born, of course, he in effect killed his mother, but that is decidedly different from stabbing a man with a shard of glass and witnessing his death, knowing forever that he took something he can never, will never, does not even wish to, return.

Returning is such a strange notion.

Because Will doesn’t so much as return to his crimes, his past, as he never actually leaves. Will’s ghosts walk just behind his right shoulder, a train growing longer, alive in death, with Will the snake and they the scales of his perpetually shedding skin. He grows instead of them; he grows and shifts because of them. In a way, he keeps them—alive. Jonas dying, when Will was 13, in Will’s arms, was as much a part of him then as the memory of him dying is now, future becoming present.

Ms. Gladys, when Will was 18, and Ben, at 22.

Will is 22 the first time he kills someone for money and for goods. He’s 23 the first time someone then owes him a favor, is in his debt, as Will accepts the addition of a diplomat to his train of the dead, the murdered, even as Marcus gifts Will both a marker and a formal introduction into a whole different world.

“Welcome aboard, kid,” the older man says, eyes sparkling but voice somber. He shakes his head at Will, and Will can see into Marcus clearly enough and translate his body language well enough to know Marcus wants to reach out and pat Will’s shoulder, perhaps even ruffle his hair, commiserate over their intersecting poor lots in life. Marcus, however, is almost like Will, in that he himself is something of a mirror and stage for others, and so he thankfully glances at and understands Will well enough to resist the impulse.

Marcus then drives them into the city proper, something Will has been avoiding for years, knowing once he steps inside. . .   

He pulls to a stop in front of a hotel, wherein the two of them have a meeting with another man and strike a deal that goes down in a record book, and then Will declines Marcus’s offer of a ride back to his shitty motel room.

He finds his own way back, forward, and adjacent, over the course of years, a decade and more, even as he keeps the hefty weight of Marcus’s gratitude always close, a solid metal thing, bigger than a coin, housing Marcus’s bloody thumbprint. Featuring a spike and ornate scrollwork, the marker is an oath, a promise, a talisman for something almost like what Will thinks he’s been searching for forever.

Will is 31 the first time a job really goes wrong, goes really, really wrong.

He is 31 the first time he encounters the man only haltingly referred to as Il Mostro, and even then only in whispers.

The man grins as Will manages to slice into his bicep, bites his lip almost coyly as he nearly succeeds in shearing off a large flap of skin from the back of Will’s right hand, and audibly chuckles as Will finally gains enough space to, pride be damned, run away down the street.

“You’re lucky,” the bartender of the Continental says later, placing Will’s order of bourbon right next to his bandaged right hand. “Can’t think of anyone else who’s escaped him.”

Will huffs and reaches out to take the glass with his left hand. Bringing it to his lips, he mutters, before taking a gulp, “Make him sound like Death.”

“Not a joke,” the bartender says, her eyes trying to catch his, her voice deeper than somber and colder than cautionary.

Her rebuke isn’t wholly undeserved, and so he just smiles back at the delicate space between her eyebrows. Will is perpetually rude. When he was younger, it bothered him that he couldn’t ever find the same path others naturally travel, but he’s accepted his strangeness, knows his crazy, and he leaves well enough alone and is mostly left well enough alone in turn.

Except for Il Mostro.

Roughly two years after that first encounter, Will is sightseeing, carefully placing his feet on cobblestones between two backstreets around three in the morning in late autumn, when footsteps begin steadily clicking behind him.

Man, boots, jacket but no coat, well-made, relatively tall, relatively slender but muscular, athletic, carrying all sorts of weapons on his person.

Will stops, takes a deep breath, and says, over his left shoulder, “Fancy meeting you here.”

Quick intake, but the other doesn’t stop walking. Then he’s at Will’s elbow, right alongside Jonas and Ms. Gladys and Ben and Gregory and Mitch.

Then Il Mostro asks Will, in French, “Enjoying the scenery?”

And Will huffs, in amusement, in frustration, in interest because here is a battle to be waged on two fronts, a high stakes game of chicken with a man who terrifies those who professionally terrorize.

They walk together, and Will doesn’t look, even as the other does, as the other in fact stares, in amusement, in delight.

Will finds himself smiling.

He smiles at Il Mostro and can’t, and doesn’t even want to, determine whether it’s because he’s mirroring the man or because he, Will Graham, might actually be feeling something resembling. . .

In the nearly deserted square, now at around four in the morning, with its fountains and archways and ancient architecture, the other man slows his steps and asks, “An early breakfast, perhaps? My treat.”

Will’s shoes are not custom like the other’s, and his clothes are neither fine nor flattering, and his own reputation is a snail against this man’s lion, but Will has never actually been on the path to begin with, so stepping further into the dark and deadly woods isn’t anything resembling frightening. He nods his head, and the man steers them toward a small bakery. There, he orders a small café table’s worth of food and drink, strong and sweet and fresh and gone too soon. The two of them sit and eat and converse lightly like others, other normal people, only with their weapons and masks and innuendo intact, and with, as Will discovers, complementary intelligence, opinion, and—skill sets.

Will is charmed.

The other cooks, where Will fishes. He composes music, where Will writes, and once the end of the meal is upon them, Will times it so that he can briefly study the other’s face while the man is occupied with settling the tab. Will pointedly looks away when the moment ends and the man returns to their table, and he can feel the other’s frustration, but he also catches that now familiar strain of amusement, that thick thread of curiosity he makes no attempt to disguise. Will stands and takes his coat from the back of his chair, and together they exit out into the early gasp of dawn, sun rising over water and beneath clouds, heavy and bright and past almost before Will can fully appreciate it.

At a fountain, the other man stops and tries, like so many others, to catch Will’s eyes.

He almost succeeds, and Will almost wants him to.

“It was a pleasure,” the other says, still in French, even as they stand in Italy. He bows at the waist before Will can think of a worthy response, and then Il Mostro is walking away.

Four and a half years later, their paths cross a third time.


	2. Chapter 2

Will doesn’t often take the obviously noteworthy jobs, is more than fine leaving that to the bigger fish, bigger names. He prefers the intimacy of knowing his prey. Figures the least he owes each of them is meeting their eyes as he kills them, murders them, takes them away from their lives and forces them into his own. Guns aren’t really his thing.

He’s not foolish enough to circle one area or keep a home, but he’s best down in deep in cities, at the ground level, or even wholly outside them, out in the sticks, the wilderness. Will favors local scandals and corruption to major empires and regimes: mayor of a small town instead of a governor, emissary instead of a member of a royal family, rival gang leader instead of a crime boss, stock broker instead of a CEO. In and around like a shark, Will circles and studies and learns until he knows what’s fitting, and then he strikes at night. Not when they’re asleep, but after a shower, after a drink or the dishes are done or the kids have left for a sleepover. Rebecca had just kissed her two kids goodbye and seen them begrudgingly off with their father for the weekend. She had closed the front door and sighed and settled in for a quiet night in front of the computer with all its incriminating data, when Will pulled away from the wall and caught her securely around the throat.

Not merciful, no, but he likes to think himself considerate. His father hadn’t succeeded in teaching him much before he died, but Will can still easily step sideways into that moment as they drove from the grocery store back to the trailer when his father, without looking at him, said, “Golden rule, and that’s the damned truth right there. Man goes through life, snares trying to catch him every which way, but I’m telling you, only thing worth anything is how you treat people.”

Will still wakes up, having dreamed of giving his father the death he deserved: at sea, of course, under a clear starry sky, with a tug on the line and a quick flash of silver, straight to the heart—a moment that hurt with precision, unique to him, with everything he was right there in sight, in reach.

Will still wakes up sometimes, thinking he killed his father himself and got it right, replacing tragedy with beauty, replacing a drunk insurance salesman who’d never met him with his son who loved him desperately.

Will is almost 38 when he wakes up and knows someone is in his motel room. His hand is already on his knife, when the intruder flicks on the bathroom light.

“Get dressed, kid,” Marcus tells him.

Will tosses back the motel sheet in response, and Marcus just huffs at seeing him already, still, always dressed.

They’re outside in the parking lot, and Will asks, “Yours or mine?”

Marcus says, “Mine. Get your stuff,” and Will just holds up the bag he carried out of the room. “Jeez, kid,” Marcus mutters, “you need a life,” already heading for the driver’s side.

Half an hour later, Will asks, “What sort of business?”

Marcus sighs, rubs his right hand over his face as he signals into the left lane to pass a semi. Another mile streams by before he answers. “Kids.”

“Yours?” Will asks, voice as casual as he can hope to make it, catching sight of Marcus wincing from his peripheral.

“No. No, this is just. . . ”

He never finishes. They do the job together, and Will—appreciates the camaraderie. He refuses a cut of the fee.

“S’pose I owe you another one then,” Marcus jokes, gesturing toward the interior pocket of Will’s ratty old coat where he’d sewn in that marker, that marker from almost 16 years ago.

“Nah,” Will says as cheerfully as he can hope to make it. He shrugs, and Marcus looks like he wants to slap Will’s shoulder or hug him.

He doesn’t.

And then Will is on a different continent two months later when the news finally catches up to him that Marcus is dead. Reneged on a contract for Wick, of all people. Afterward, the heads went through Marcus’s resume, tried to track down any other loose ends.

Turns out, that job with the kids was another part of Marcus’s troubling pattern. Turns out, Marcus was supposed to kill those three kids and make it look like carbon monoxide.

Will finds out all this the same way he finds out he himself is now a loose thread: a relatively tall man in a bespoke three-piece suit tails him for several blocks among the crowd in Berlin before speeding up to walk alongside him. The man smells the same as he did four and a half years prior in Florence, as he eventually reaches over and wraps a hand around Will’s elbow. He says by his ear, in French again, “Good evening, Pickerel.”

Will sighs and rolls his eyes. “Not my name.”

The other makes a sound almost like a snort if a snort weren’t too undignified. When they’re farther from the center, the man who is Il Mostro pulls Will into some monster of a wine bar and manages to get them a small table in a reasonably quiet corner. Will’s never been much for wine, but just the way the other man’s body language smoothes out, his strides lower in his hips, his shoulders falling back naturally and not ratcheted in tight with tension, is enough to convince him the stuff has its uses.

The other doesn’t immediately talk, instead spends a good five minutes enjoying his vintage whatever, forcing Will to ask snidely in passable European French, index finger of his right hand, the hand this one had permanently scarred more than six years ago, running in tiny circles around the foot of his own glass, “Enjoying the scenery?”

“Tremendously,” the man says. He first carefully sets down his glass before saying, “You’re on the list now.”

Will is almost always thankful he never makes eye contact with those who aren’t dying or dead because it allows for moments, like this one, wherein he can quietly fall apart in public.

“Marcus?” he eventually asks and sees the other nod.

More time, but then Will is closing his eyes and asking, “You take it?”

And the other says, now for Will only a thick disembodied voice, everywhere and nowhere and as smooth and deep and dark as midnight on still water, “Never.”

Will’s eyes pop open in shock, and he looks before he can stop himself.

The other’s mouth is not smiling, his lips relaxed and naturally downturned and glum, but his eyes—his eyes sparkle and grin and speak volumes.

But then the mouth opens, and the man says, “I’m Hannibal.”

And he’s so far into the woods now that the only way out is through, so he says, concluding formal introductions, “Will.”


	3. Chapter 3

He follows the other as they cross and break between pedestrians, as they walk together once more in silence, the sun just beginning to set, vanishing behind buildings and reappearing in streams across streets. Hannibal falls into a practiced and steady pace, his shoulders wide and relaxed, his hair swept back casually and efficiently, and his hands shockingly empty: empty, where Will is clenching his favorite knife in his right hand and holding his left arm slightly behind himself to make reaching for another that much easier; empty, although Will can easily spot the slight bulges under the man’s fitted jacket, at his forearms and under his shoulders.

Holsters but not for guns. Knives, knives like Will.   

Will should have his eyes elsewhere, scanning for other contractors, but he keeps darting back to stare at those pale, scarred, open hands. As they’d left the wine bar, the other had moved his arm toward Will but immediately cut off the gesture, and Will couldn’t quite catch the resolution, what the move might have been. Was it an arm slinking behind Will to hold open the door for him? Was it a gentle bump to his shoulder to steer him the right way?

Was it perhaps, Will wonders, as he somehow manages to trip on perfectly smooth sidewalk, one of those bare hands darting in close to land at the small of Will’s back, alighting like a bird on a branch, surprisingly steady and familiar for all that they are but the newest of acquaintances and still potentially adversaries?

Foolish, this, and suicidal, following a notoriously wicked assassin to a decidedly private residence like a stray dog, and after he’s just informed Will there’s a termination contract out on him, with nothing but the man’s own word he’s not accepted it. But Will has always seen deeper, and what lies beneath the other man’s mask isn’t deceit. It’s cruel, but it’s honest.

Hannibal slows at the entrance to what Will is guessing is some kind of flat, white stone with a dark gray door, rental, temporary.

“Yours?” Will asks.

The other nods and slowly, exaggeratedly pulls from his pocket a small ring of keys. He looks at Will over his shoulder, and Will stares at that strange mouth as it curls into a smirk.

So precise, as tailored as his clothing, this man is. . .

He waves Will inside first, and Will goes but with raised eyebrows. Inside, it’s a wide open floor plan with wood floors and endless white furniture, fixtures, and walls. Two bedrooms and one bathroom, Will thinks, standing in between an impersonal sofa and armchair, in between, as the other man places the keys pointedly on the coffee table, a rendering and a person.

“How long have you been here?” Will asks, cataloguing the tiny missteps, the signs that not all is as flawless as it appears.

“Eight days,” Hannibal says, moving quietly over to an ornate coffee machine in the kitchen.

Will walks farther away, digs further beneath, finds a book of poetry lying closed on a table by the balcony doors. No bookmark, no dog-eared pages because of course the other can recall where he left off.

“Do you find it,” comes Hannibal’s voice, soaring neatly over the muttering grumble of a heating espresso maker, “a difficult profession?”

Calm and exact like a scalpel.

“No,” says Will, “ ‘difficult’ isn’t the word I’d use.” He turns, and Hannibal is staring at him.

“And the act itself? What word would you use to describe that?”

Will walks back across the apartment, ends up leaning against the counter, right next to Hannibal. “How would _you_ describe it?” he asks, voice challenging instead of the coy he’d been aiming for.

“Invigorating, but it is different for you.”

Will winces, eyes on his own rough hands. He says, “No sugar,” jerking his chin at the two tiny white demitasses on the counter.

“Of course.”

Deliberate and elaborate, and Will already knew that years before even their first encounter. Il Mostro doesn’t drop bodies by the score, doesn’t gun them down en masse or flee the scene like a ghost. Will thinks of Baba Yaga when he thinks of high body counts and gore, and he thinks of the Shrike and the Ripper when he thinks of disappearing acts. He doesn’t think refined and imaginative. Il Mostro is clear and decisive but also—metaphorical, playful.

Il Mostro orchestrates, sculpts, carves each and every death into something terribly beautiful and then hangs around to watch the fallout. If he’s been here for eight days, then he’s either gearing up or cooling down.

Or he’s here because. . .

“Monumental,” Will whispers, just as Hannibal finishes reloading the machine for more espresso. Tight and packed within metal, poured into a cup and presented with flourish, the scent of coffee is nearly overwhelming, filling the whole airy room and somehow compressing everything thick and immediate. Will looks up and says, to Hannibal’s left cheekbone, like marble, like his bones somehow ride closer to his skin, “Like possession.”

Hannibal seems to be looking at the espresso, and his looks aren’t exactly deceiving but neither are they wholly candid.

This is him being considerate—of Will.

Hannibal asks his demitasse, “Of them?”

Will bites his lip before confessing, “Of me.”

That gets him those eyes snapping to his, lightning strike, and Will catches the silhouette of the man before he slips away again back behind his veil. Will reaches out with his right hand and curls his fingers and palm around Hannibal’s forearm, around the knife beneath his jacket.

“What are we doing?” he asks.

“Conversing,” the other says, just as the second batch of espresso finishes with a loud hiss. Time to pour for himself, but Hannibal stays perfectly, inhumanly still, not a wrinkle, not a hair out of place, his smooth and clean human-like shell so pristine Will almost can’t breathe for wanting to expose what’s coiling just underneath.

Shifting his weight, Will slowly turns and reaches out with his left hand, softly running his fingers along the bare strip of skin between Hannibal’s hairline and suit jacket. He asks for them both, “Filling or expanding a void?”

And in a flash, the arm beneath his hand has shifted, and the rest of Hannibal’s body is pushing Will back into the counter, hard.

Not wholly unexpected.

Hannibal grabs him by the back of his neck, mirroring Will. He says, completing the sentence, a period giving everything before it meaning and weight, “Neither.”

He says, “Connection.”

It’s Will, and it isn’t Will, who bridges the gap between them. It’s both. He wants, and Hannibal wants, and here they reflect not just others.


	4. Chapter 4

He can remember being 15 years old and thinking it still wasn’t that big of a deal even in the middle of the act, that it was just lips to lips and rolling, studdering hips and exposure, just penetration in the most unapologetically vulgar way, sweat and semen and some blood with no emotional or rational tethers to elevate the experience above the basest of instincts. He’d hated it then, had hated the entire sick farce of his body and senses ravenous while his mind recoiled.

Will has grown to hate sex and be terrified of intimacy, and he could easily re-inhabit that pointed teenage disdain right now in Hannibal’s rental kitchen, summon that familiar mindset and wear it right out the door like his well worn coat, strapped to himself like his beloved tackle, something shielding him and giving him an out, a living memory standing guard between him and everything else.

But as Hannibal’s hands turn from desperate to cradling, cupping Will’s face as he pulls back to search for something in his expression, Will doesn’t want to put on that weight, false and ill-fitting as it now would be, and neither does he want, to his distracted consternation, to put distance between himself and someone else, himself and another, who and what he has turned himself into and this person named Hannibal.

How unspeakably strange that he wants to get closer, burrow into, encircle and study, that he wants to sink into the other almost as much as he wants him to come inside.

Will smiles at the double entendre.

Hannibal’s eyes flick to Will’s curving lips, and he makes an inquisitive sound, a low-pitched resonant, “Hmm?” that has Will breathing in quick, mouth open in something very like a gasp.

He shakes his head minutely. He says to Hannibal’s exquisite brow ridge, “Of course.”

The other man takes an abrupt two steps back, disentangling from Will completely before about-facing and walking away. Will takes stock for a moment, takes a deep breath, pushes up from his veritable sprawl against the kitchen counter and then takes the plunge: he follows Hannibal deeper into the apartment.

Along the way, he passes a chair holding Hannibal’s discarded suit jacket and swallows hard.

The master bedroom is surprisingly dark, all jewel tones and heavy fabric and plush textures, a marked contrast from the rest of the rental, and Hannibal waiting by the foot of the massive bed with his waistcoat in his hands is similarly—compelling. Will almost stalls in the doorway, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say he thinks he should stall. As he comes to stand across the bed from Hannibal, automatically mirroring his posture, Will can feel this moment traveling through his brain from the front to the interior, a dark weight slithering from fleeting memory to permanent fixture.

Will aims to strengthen those fledgling associations, means to hold on as tightly as possible.

He wants them to endure.

Beyond this room, the world spins, but within it, “Connection?” he repeats.

Hannibal's cuffs are loose, and the knives he'd had hidden under there are now hiding somewhere else. He tosses his waistcoat onto a nearby rack of some kind, and when he turns back to look at Will, his face is blank. Another layer of clothing taken off, that. He challenges Will, but Will’s known since the beginning that nearly all expression on that face must appear only with considerable effort from its owner. No surprise there. Will stumbled upon that little gem within minutes of encountering Il Mostro all those years ago in the dim lighting of a residential street on the wrong side of the man’s fists. Hand to hand, whereas Will relies on his stealth and his blades, in that order, fighting the man had occupied a great deal of his attention, but a small stream of information seeped through nevertheless: when he smiles, it’s almost always forced, the same for when he grimaces; when he tortures, it’s for pleasure; and he never breaks his own skewed code.

Il Mostro is a master thespian portraying a human assassin, and he performs best with a script, although he improvises adequately. There is always a lag between the action and his reaction, an often infinitesimal lag, a lag few are equipped to detect and even fewer stupid enough to acknowledge.

Will is just the right combination, the wrong kind, of perceptive and reckless.

When Hannibal stares at Will void of emotion, that’s when Will actually sees the whole shape of him, sees into the dynamic mind and soul churning and roiling behind his eyes, can make out the extent of this malformed offshoot of humanity, this unique misstep in evolution. It’s like being given a rare gift, for when Hannibal reads empty on the surface, no strain, no visible joy, when he is but sudden movement and rapid thought—that’s when Will knows that Hannibal, beneath the suits and sneers and smirks, is something very much like Will’s mirror.

A beautiful kind of grotesque very much like Will.

Will walks around the bed and presumptuously starts unbuttoning Hannibal’s shirt, smooth and fine and certainly preposterously expensive with its tiny ivory buttons Will’s rough fingers can barely feel, and in that time they hardly breathe separately. It’s never this seamless, and Will hopes this isn’t the highlight of the encounter because in his experience anticipation always outstrips completion.

He smiles again at the innuendo, and Hannibal dips his head to try and catch his eyes.

Will says, as he parts the shirt and pushes it back to bare Hannibal’s chest and shoulders, “You wanted me that night, didn’t you.”

“Undeniably,” he says, reaching behind himself to pull off the shirt from one wrist and then the other, before carefully tossing it too on the rack. He thus gives Will an unobstructed view of his torso, with his hair in disarray, his lips red, cheeks flushed, and still the man isn’t anything like exposed or awkward.

Will says, “You’d never deny anything,” and the other all but puffs out his chest.

In any other encounter, this would be the point when Will would falter and either draw back in preparation for a swift exit or push forward too hastily, too aggressive in his attempt to match the other person. This is universally when Will kills the mood by saying the wrong thing, asking for the wrong thing, or making the wrong face.

Hannibal robs him of the chance of wrecking the moment by returning Will’s earlier favor and pushing at the shoulders of Will’s cheap jacket until he shrugs it off. Will carelessly throws the jacket behind him just as Hannibal starts pulling at the hem of Will’s Henley. Up over his head, and then he’s flinging that too. Hannibal’s face doesn’t shift or emote so much as his eyes then look at Will differently.

He doesn’t live in his head the same way as Will, but that is the clearest place to spot him. His body is too unpredictable.

Fishing is what Will does, but Hannibal, with his clever hands unbuckling, unbuttoning, unzipping Will’s pants, with his sly comments and silent prodding, is a hunter through and through.


	5. Chapter 5

At 18, 19, 20, and 21, following the death of Ms. Gladys, following his murdering of her, Will is pained. He finds no comfort anywhere yet hasn’t the resolve for opting out. He survives, without family, friends, without any money or prospects. He lives on the streets, in alleys, in gasping ten-minute increments, crawling hour to hour, day by day, and he doesn’t try for anything else because he knows he is undeserving, and while the world is unfathomably unjust—here is Will’s chance to do something right.

He has earned the filthy alleys and abandoned buildings, the disgusted looks and carelessly tossed spare change, the scavenged rotting food and gifts presented reeking of pity, because he has killed, murdered in cold blood, and doesn’t regret it, because he doesn’t wish to change or repent or atone.

Will is glad he did what he did and not just because the world is better off without Jonas and Ms. Gladys, which it most assuredly is. He is glad for some other reason, glad and bold and utterly vile.

So he punishes himself.

For almost five years, he haunts the liminal spaces curling between everyone else, the depthless gaps and passes bridging isolation and recognition, desperation and determination, fear and release. Will sleeps and wakes and walks places others are too scared to even contemplate behind the safety of their closed eyelids.

He survives as a wretch, garnering others’ guilt and pity to the point he overflows with secondhand shame, to the point he almost believes his own act as seen through their eyes, nearly convinces himself he is actually ashamed of what he’s done and what he’s become.

For almost five years, he tries to find some kind of purpose or penance in fitting the mold still allowed him. He eats garbage, body and mind, and is sick, weak. He is dying and for nothing.

The turning point is a man named Ben whom Will has witnessed commit terrible crimes and who eventually attempts one such crime against Will. It isn’t self-defense what Will does to him in return, but it finally feels like justice. It feels right in ways his own suffering hasn’t. Will guts Ben like a fish in one of his alleyways, using Ben’s own cheap knife, and Will is seen doing so by another homeless man.

Instead of fear or disgust or shame or pity, however, Will is gifted a ratty blanket and a filthy five dollar bill and the recognition that this is in fact where he fits: the axes joining and separating hunting, killing, murdering and assassination.

He hadn’t doubted himself from then onward, not until he’d taken a job just outside of Baltimore.

Nearly two full weeks of ghosting his target had led him to a Thursday night catch, tucked back among some shrubs out in the alley between luxury townhomes, waiting for Dr. Du Maurier to turn off the lights and head upstairs for a scorchingly hot bath. He’d messed with the security system on the eighth day and again two days ago. Du Maurier has someone scheduled to come out tomorrow, early in the morning so she won’t have to cancel any of her appointments, and so Will is casting tonight. He likes the thoughtfulness of it, likes not having to leave her alone for too long. And he likes deadlines, steadfast points he can orient himself around.

He waits and watches as much as he can from back here, filling in the blanks within his head when Du Maurier glides out of sight of the back windows—rolling the tape, as his father called it.

Climbing the stairs now, hand on the rail.

Taking the heels off only when the closet is in sight, one hand on the doorway, bracing.

Padding through to the bathroom and starting the taps, making sure the water’s the right temperature before plugging the tub.

Five minutes to get clean, and then it’s just unwinding, sighing, hands unclenching and loosening along the porcelain and–

Noise to Will’s left, and he gasps, flinches, starts to turn–

–and is struck in the side of the head with a closed fist. He stumbles, crashing loudly through the bushes and scraping the palm of his hand against the rough wood of the fence on the property across from Du Maurier’s. From his peripheral, he catches sight of an incredibly blurry figure charging toward him and dodges just in time to avoid being tackled, likely to the ground, judging by the extent of the attacker’s resulting lurch.

Not young and not old, his attacker is white and in good shape. He’s also got a bit of height and a good deal of muscle on Will, and he wastes no time rushing again. Will blocks another fist, this one aimed at his chest, and then another, going for his throat, but he fails to keep clear of the other’s feet, becoming tangled and trapped. And once he’s slowly losing a little ground here and there, taking a hit that actually connects with his leg this time and crashing to the pavement, taking an elbow to the mouth and a sucker punch to the kidney, he begins rapidly losing more and more ground: because soon light is glinting off metal, and there’s the unmistakable sound of air being cut by a quick blade. Will keeps trying to pull one of his own knives but realizes, with dread and astonishment and something else he can’t name yet, that the other knows he’s trying and is actively preventing him.

He’s anticipating Will’s reactions, and Will is dumbfounded—and something else. . .

Will takes a deep slice to his left bicep attempting a grab for the small of his back. He manages to block another sweeping cut, forearm to forearm, only to end up losing some strange bout of arm-wrestling, the other’s small knife then slipping along Will’s right hand.

“Fuck,” Will gasps, and it’s only luck that the other looks up toward Will’s eyes, that the other is grinning, fucking amused, distracted enough in his merriment that those dangerous legs aren’t winding around Will.

Will takes advantage, sacrificing the back of his hand in order to jerk back, stagger a few steps clear, and then flat-out bolt down the alleyway in retreat.

Rapid footsteps pursue him, the other’s breath, real or imagined, puffing onto Will’s neck only spurring him on.

He gets away.

Will’s been intensely haunting these streets for two weeks straight, after all. And he is never more resourceful than when he’s terrified.

He escapes that encounter intact but only somewhat, only marginally. Before that contract, before that specific alley skirmish, Will was getting better, getting comfortable. Afterward, after tangling with Il Mostro, he isn’t surviving.

And two years later, it’s the same footsteps at his back, the same ones he’s been hearing, real or imagined, the entire time between.

Will haunts the foggy liminal spaces linking and unraveling everyone else, the alleys and corridors and dead-ends, but it isn’t until Il Mostro, until Hannibal, that he knows what it is to feel truly alive, to thrive.

Hannibal gifts him peace and purpose.


	6. Chapter 6

Two weeks before that encounter just outside Baltimore, before Il Mostro, the immediate ‘before’ which only makes sense in the ‘after,’ Will is doing the trek up the stairs to Bowery on Delancey around eleven at night, when he takes special notice of the crazy who’s set up shop on the intermediate landing. She’s the complete picture, matted hair, wild eyes, sallow, grimy skin, perfectly decked out in layer upon layer of torn, filthy, mismatched clothing. Will tries to avoid her, unsettled by the overwhelming rush of sick nostalgia that wafts over to him, all rancid breath and fetid bedroll and the tiniest courtesies, enduring extremes of frigid winters and sweltering summers and only here and there a week or two of fall and spring and living something redeemingly humiliating, something unapologetically human, something honest. 

This one’s raving about her nieces who are somehow government plants but “not the agent type, the spy, no, no, no, _living_ _plants_ , leafy, fucking hopscotching green, full of chlorophyll. Oh, great gifts! But _you_ wouldn’t know it because they _weren’t_ green, you piece of lying shit, and that’s how we knew– ”

Will is passing by and gets pushed too close, and that’s when she grabs his arm. Before he can even react, she’s asking, in a calm voice that’s downright discreet for a public place like this, “Got time for a consultation, Pickerel?”

Will says to her right hand curled tight around his left forearm, “Not my fucking name.”

She grins, her front teeth noticeably yellow but not the rotting disaster they’d be if she were actually living rough, her breath not bad enough, her skin and eyes too clear.

Enough to pass casual inspection, certainly, which is the most any person gets who’s thought to be homeless, but Will knows better, knows intimately.

His misplaced melancholy slowly drowns in dread: dread and something nastier, some angry uncoiling beast, like guilt but flaunted or shame that’s violent.

“Come on,” she says, tugging his arm a little and pulling him back down toward the stairs, the train platform, and Will suddenly knows exactly where this little ‘consultation’ is being held.

He lets himself be led.

Sure enough, she times it so nobody’s watching as they nonchalantly walk over to and through the locked staircase, which isn’t locked for her hands. Will wants to look around, find the other ‘crazy’ who has to have been monitoring this unlocked entrance so no poor fool stumbles into a secret meeting, a partner who is maybe even in contact with this woman here, maybe through an earpiece, but Will’s always been more curious than careful.

They climb the stairs up to the closed mezzanine and proceed right on across it and back down more stairs to the abandoned Jamaica-bound platform. The woman’s still got her hand on Will’s arm, but she isn’t smiling anymore. The graffiti’s not nearly as bad as Will expected, and the platform itself is cleaner than the one actually in use, but the imposing man with the two cronies at his back more than makes up for pleasant appearances. Will is efficiently herded over and boxed in, three in front and one, the woman, at his back, and through gaps in the barrier he can see across to the busy Bowery stop. He wonders at his chances if he has to jump the tracks—should this consultation go poorly.

He’s good at escapes, good at survival.

“Well, hello! Finally!” the big man in front exclaims, loud and grinning and sounding utterly delighted.

Will is not put at ease, but he is slightly amused despite himself.

“You are one tough son of a bitch to pin down,” the man continues. Over the top of his glasses, Will catches the man turning a bit to the two men behind him, his lackeys, his muscle, maybe his advisors. “How’d you put it?” he asks the one to his left.

“Slippery,” the short blond man says, equally cheerful.

Hilarious.

Big man laughs, a loud booming bark that echoes around the forgotten tile and abandoned terracotta reliefs.

“Bowery King, I presume?” Will asks.

The man nods and slowly, obviously, exaggeratedly closes the distance between them until he’s a foot away and staring.

“Pickerel,” the man says, and his tone has shifted to grave, tentative, which makes sense when he follows it up with, “or do you prefer ‘Will’?”

He doesn’t react, no shocked recoil or startled glance upward resulting in eye contact, but Will is definitely shook up. To find and trace him, as not only the fucking Pickerel, but also ‘Will,’ means they’re connected, clever, determined, and dangerous. And if they have ‘Will’ then they almost certainly have ‘Graham,’ which means they know. . .

Will sighs and reaches up to rub his eyes under his glasses. He asks, “What is this?”

“You’re wasted on all that smalltime bullshit,” the fucking Bowery King says.

That has Will glancing up and then to the side, but it’s enough time to catch and release the man’s eyes, to determine what’s lurking in his voice. “Are you propositioning me?” Will eventually asks.

One of the goons laughs, the blond one again.

But the Bowery King only quits trying to recapture Will’s eyes and lifts his chin high. He says, “Shamelessly. Your reputation precedes you, and I have a need for someone who does what you do so very well.”

“You make it sound like a retainer agreement,” Will says, scowling.

The King shrugs, suddenly genial again. “If you like,” he says, and it’s magnanimous in the most condescending way possible.

The nerve of this man. . .

Will catches himself before he swings, but he definitely twitches toward the King, and the woman still behind him starts to move to intercept him. Will neatly sidesteps out of her reach and whirls around, pacing sideways to the edge of the platform, with its bright yellow tactile warning strips. The woman doesn’t follow, and no one else moves, just Will, back toward the graffitied wall and then toward the abandoned tracks, over and over again.

“Someone’s set their sights on my people,” the King abruptly says. When Will doesn’t stop or look up, he adds, “And I know what you’re thinking, but this wasn’t the usual blowback. This was—sick.” He hesitates, and then he bites out, “Playful.”

Will stops pacing, putting him next to the bricked-over former newsstand. “ ‘Playful,’ ” he repeats, carefully.

He can see the King nod from the corner of his eye and the woman relax her stance just a hair. They think they’ve hooked him.

“Flowers,” says the third man, a tall brunet.

Will glances at his face, and the man shifts a little and clears his throat.

Will almost smiles at the proof he makes these hardened criminals nervous.

The brunet, now looking into the middle distance at a spot hovering around Will’s feet, then says, “Our guy had flowers and a fucking tree growing out of his goddamn chest.”

“Gives new meaning to memorial tree,” adds the blond man.

The brunet shoots the blond a nasty look, and the woman by Will makes a face.

The King is looking at Will with raised eyebrows.

“So you want to hire me,” Will asks, “to, what? Take care of the person who commissioned your ‘playful gardener’? I’m not a detective, and I don’t do these territorial disputes or rival gang bullshit.”

“Oh, I already know who did the hiring,” the Bowery King says, “and that matter has been dealt with—decisively. What you’re going to do for me is take care of the ‘gardener.’ ”

“Oh, I am, am I?” Will asks the ceiling.

The King looks at Will and says, “Mr. Graham,” and at least doesn’t smile.

He looks at Will and says, “I think you’ll discover the particulars of this contract here perfectly align with your, uh, interests, especially considering all that business in the asylum.”

Will says, “Extortion.”

The King shakes his head. “Mutual advantage: a contract for you to branch out a little and do some gardening of your own.” He then waves toward the woman, who approaches Will and holds out a business card.

Will takes it.

“The gardener,” she tells him.

Will reads it, not even surprised it’s a woman’s name. He asks, “Why me?”

“You don’t recognize her?” Will hears the brunet ask, suspicious.

The blond snipes, “Maybe _can’t_ recognize her.”

And Will doesn’t have to look to know he’s making the circular motion around his ear, which is rich considering Will’s the only one here who doesn’t look like he’s homeless and possibly mentally ill.

Looks are often deceiving.

“She’s a fucking shrink,” the King says, finally. “Works from home now, but she was at Baltimore during your stint.”

Will takes a deep breath and says, “Revenge.”

The King nods. “Mutual advantage.”


End file.
